>The answer being who gives a shit?

As a web developer, you should. It will save you work in the long run (see below).

As a hacker, you should, the same way you care about the beauty of readable code in any other language.

As a business owner, you should, because it will save you money, in bandwidth costs, future maintenance, training etc etc.

>Does it look fine in most browsers?

It looks fine in most browsers because the browser decided to make it look fine. That doesn't mean that it'll look fine in the browser everyone is using tomorrow. That means more work for you down the road, for no particular reason.

Do I care about it? No, not really. But I do get a little annoyed at hackers that concern themselves with code elegance in every language except HTML.

> It will save you work in the long run

That's the biggest lie of them all. And maintenance? No one does that, they do re-writes. How many hours have I wasted on this joke of not using tables?

Have you ever operated a website with over a hundred pages? Just curious.

And as far as hours wasted, having coded both ways, and originally viewing css as stupid and more work, I can now code a website in half the time using it than tables.

In fact, when I'm just hacking something quick, it's great not to bother with any layout at all and just come back to it when I have the time. You can't do that with tables.

Who maintains 'hundreds of pages' of HTML? Don't you offload everything into templates or dynamically generate it? The last time I managed hundreds of pages of html, or even html with dynamic content spliced in, was in 2001, and that was against my will.

A quick rewrite took care of that too. HTML is an output format, not a language.

As an output format, it should be easily altered to display in various forms.

CSS with semantic HTML achieves this, embedded presentation does not.

> achieves this

The hell it does... Not to mention that separating the two is such a futile waste of time in so many cases.

I was a lead developer on a massive website...

If you are a programmer on a large site you won't touch the design. It will be done by a skilled designer, or designing firm. You won't care how its done whatsoever.

There is a lot more to say here...but basically you won't touch the design. Or want to. Or care how its done :)

Which is why you shouldn't be using HTML to "present" data. You do exactly this when you attempt to use tables for things other than tabular data.

Boy, would I love to never have to think of XHTML/CSS.

The reality has always been quite different.

At least churning out valid XHTML+CSS from Photoshop designs has now become a commodity business: http://onwebapps.com/39-photoshop-psd-to-xhtml-css-services/

I'm sorry you haven't seen the light yet, brother :-)

Who gives a shit? Hackers. And, y'know, with this happening to be Hacker News and all, it works.

You can't "hack" html or css, they aren't languages. Furthermore, CSS is a lie. A lie for designer snobs.

...says the developer snob.

You can use tables or css, I don't care. Forcing one over the other is rediculous though. And yes, only snobs insist on never using tables.

Oh, so when everyone keeps saying the cake is a lie, they mean "CSS" by "the cake"?

And where do smart people put their cake? On a table, that's where.

It's been pointed out that HTML is not Turing complete. You can interpret a page as a state and a link as a transition. That makes HTML the equivalent of regular expressions. Definitely worthy of the title hack.

Does it matter for this site? No.

Should you, as a developer (ahem... I mean hacker), care about the quality of the markup your app is producing. Definitively yes..

My only problem with table nazis is when they do their job poorly.

i.e. they insist on a tableless layout, yet when you look at their design in IE6/7, the right sidebar always seems to end up at the bottom of the page.

So instead of working on real code / markup, you always seem to be fixing a broken sidebar CSS issue, due to insistence on not using tables. (i fix these problems in 5min w/ a table-based layout)